The Gender of Silence Part 2: Agents of Change

By Sam Moore

If earlier representations of silent women in horror are defined by the idea of victimhood - that their inability to speak makes them easy to prey upon, blank slates who can be overwritten - then as the horror genre has evolved with time, the biggest change for its silent women is that they’ve gained more agency, more power, and a greater ability to change the world around them. In the last decade or so, the idea of silence has resurfaced, most recently in A Quiet Place (2018), and it’s 2021 sequel.

On the surface, silence is forced on the characters in A Quiet Place; without it, they’ll be hunted down and killed by the monsters - whose origins are explored in A Quiet Place Part 2 - that have brought on this new, post-apocalyptic world. But as both films go on, it becomes clear that the role and power of silence is more important, and more nuanced than the idea that speaking is a death sentence. In A Quiet Place, communication is the true necessity, whether it’s as a tool for survival, or an attempt to reach out to other potential survivors, somewhere beyond the sea. The real game-changer for how these new films about silence deal with communication is the way in which they introduce American Sign Language (ASL) as a way for those who can hear to communicate with Deaf characters. Both A Quiet Place and the home-invasion slasher Hush (2016). By showing the Deaf characters communicating through ASL, it gives them a voice in a way that films like The Spiral Staircase or Ms. 45 couldn’t/wouldn’t. This lets characters like Regan in A Quiet Place (Millicent Simmonds), or Maddie in Hush (Katie Siegel) speak for themselves, and push back against silence as a shorthand for weakness.

Silence in these films  acts as a kind of subversion; challenging previous representations of silence in horror. Compared to the slashers of the 70s and 80s, populated with silent male killers, the silence of the women in these films is rooted in something different. In both A Quiet Place and Hush,  Deafness t flips the script on the horror films of the 20th century; no longer is it a “defect” as in The Spiral Staircase, or the potential death sentence of The Tingler, but instead a new way to fight back.

Another home-invasion horror, Don’t Breathe (2016) is a counterpoint to these films, showing that even as time has passed, the ways in which silence is related to strength seems to exist along gendered lines. The Blind Man (Stephen Lang) in Don’t Breathe might not be Deaf like Regan or Maddie, but silence becomes a heavy presence in his house after it’s invaded; his blindness heightens his other senses, meaning that any sound that his would-be-attackers make might be their last. This is the kind of silence that exists in slashers; if a victim makes a noise on the run, the masked head of their stalker will turn, and its the end for them. The twists in Don’t Breathe also illustrate a  patriarchal abuse of power that’s reminiscent of a film like Ms. 45 - where women are forced into a kind of silence and obedience. The most interesting moments in Don’t Breathe come from the ways in which they make silence appear to be terrifying not just because of the threat of violence that lingers from breaking it, but from the palpable sense of loneliness that it creates. Scenes where the teenagers who are trying to rob The Blind Man are trapped, unable to call for help, unable to even breathe, speaks volumes for not only the power that silence can have, but what it comes to represent when filtered through the prism of maleness; it’s  can become overpowering, stripping someone of their agency, their ability to say “no.”

That’s what makes silence as a source of power in A Quiet Place and Hush so striking; by being so subversive of the worlds that these films occupy, it also feels like a subversion of how silence has been understood in horror. Here, the power of silence doesn’t come from the inevitability of a stalking killer, or a twisted sense of justice and retribution, but instead turning expectations on their head. Thissubversion is clearest in A Quiet Place, when it’s revealed that sound - the thing that draws the creatures to their victims, just as it does The Blind Man, or a killer like Michael or Jason - is the thing that’s used to kill them. Here, challenging the idea of silence isn’t just as simple as bridging the gap through communication, but the question of what you do with the voice you’ve been given. This is a big dividing line between the characters in A Quiet Place Part 2, whether it’s worth trying to reach out and communicate, or if the people that are left - if there are any - aren’t worth saving. 

In art and life, silence has always been a loaded, political topic; look no further than the Silence = Death campaign, or the interrogation of “who gets to speak and why” in feminist criticism. None of these films are political in the traditional sense but by exploring the idea of what it means to be silent through a lens of female characters who fight back, they challenge ideas that go beyond the confines of horror cinema. Fighting back, using a voice, or making silence a strategy for resistance doesn’t have to mean approaching it through the tradition of silent male figures in horror. What these films understand so well is that silence in horror has been, for better or worse, a gendered concept, and by accepting this, they’re able to show a form of power that’s rooted explicitly in the feminine by subverting ideas of victimhood and blank slates from earlier horror films. Strength isn’t something that only exists through masculinity, and the Strong Woman as a character type doesn’t need to find their strength by aligning themselves with maleness. Hush and A Quiet Place never lose sight of the fact that they’re silent characters are female, and that they are fighting on their own terms.

Sam Moore is a writer, artist, and editor. Their work has been published by the LA Review of Books, i-D, the BFI, and other places. They are one of the founding editors of Third Way Press. Their first book, All my teachers died of AIDS, was published by Pilot Press in 2020

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